The act of a black hole destroying a star kick starts a chain of events which leads to a jet travelling at near light speeds

Credit: Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF; NASA, STScI

A black hole has been caught in the act of tearing a star apart, the first time such an act has been directly observed.

The cosmic feast appears to have created a jet of material travelling at nearly the speed of light.

The hungry black hole is located in a pair of colliding galaxies collectively known as Arp 299, and it has taken over a decade of observations to make this discovery, though the results are only just being published now in the journal Science.

The first signs of something unusual in Arp 299 came in January 2005 when astronomers saw a brief burst of infrared coming from the core of the two galaxies and follow-up observations found radio emissions from the same spot.

“As time passed the new object stayed bright at infrared and radio wavelengths, but not in the visible light and X-rays,” says Seppo Mattila of the University of Turku in Finland.

“The most likely explanation is that thick interstellar gas and dust near the galaxy’s centre absorbed the X-rays and visible light, then re-radiated it as infrared.”

The team continued to observe the object for the next decade using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and other radio telescopes and found that the emission seemed to be expanding in one direction, as you would expect to see during the creation of a jet.

Radio-telescope images of the Tidal Disruption Event in Arp 299.

Credit: Mattila, Perez-Torres, et al., B. Saxton NRAO/AUI/NSF

Astronomers now think that Arp 299 contains a supermassive black hole that is shredding a star twice the mass of the Sun.

When a black hole pulls apart a star like this, the stellar material can get caught in orbit leading to a chain of events that results in a jet of particles streaming away at near light speed.

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